“Documentaries are thought to have the same relation to social change as penicillin to syphilis.”

Continuing from the previous post

Wiseman 

The importance of documentaries as political instruments for change is stubbornly clung to, despite the total absence of any supporting evidence. 

Documentaries, like plays, novels, poems, are fictional forms that have no measurable social utility.  

I have no way of determining what is or is not representative in any sequence. It’s enough for me that it occurred while I was present and that it fits into the themes I find in the material. I am not interested in ideological film-making, whether of the right or left. I remember being criticized by some on the left when I made Hospital. They knew from their ideological positions that white middle-class doctors and nurses exploited poor blacks and Hispanics. Therefore a film like Hospital which showed many white doctors and nurses (as well as black and Hispanic doctors and nurses) working hard, long hours to help their patients was ideologically offensive. Film ideologues are not interested in the discovery and surprise aspect of documentary film-making, or in trusting their own or anyone else’s independent judgement, but want documentary film-makers to confirm their own ideological, abstract views which have little or no connection with experience. Some documentary film-makers urged on in their self-generated political fantasies by academics and other ideologues, by film barons and bureaucrats, and by all those who form the parasitic platoons fluttering around film-makers, believe documentaries must educate, expose, inform, reform and effect change in a resistant and otherwise unenlightened world. Documentaries are thought to have the same relation to social change as penicillin to syphilis. The importance of documentaries as political instruments for change is stubbornly clung to, despite the total absence of any supporting evidence.

Sometimes, in his lofty condescension, a film-maker seeks to bring enlightenment to the great unwashed and force feed this or that trendy political pap to an audience which has not had the opportunity, or perhaps even the wish, to participate in either the experience or the mind of the film-maker. This, which might be called the ‘Carlos’ fantasy, suggests to the filmmaker that he is important to the world. Documentaries like plays, novels, poems – are fictional in form and have no measurable social utility.

"Is Art useful? Yes. Why? Because it is art. Is there such a thing as a pernicious form of art? Yes! The form that distorts the underlying conditions of life. Vice is alluring; then show it as alluring; but it brings with its train peculiar moral maladies and suffering; then describe them. Study all the sores, like a doctor in the course of his hospital duties, and the good-sense school, the school dedicated exclusively to morality, will find nothing to bite on. Is crime always punished, virtue always rewarded? No; and yet if your novel, if your play is well put together, no one will take it into his head to break the laws of nature. The first necessary condition for the creation of a vigorous art form is the belief in underlying unity. I defy anyone to find one single work of imagination that satisfies the conditions of beauty and is at the same time a pernicious work."

Wiseman's work has had more impact than most, but that's not the point. There's no contradiction between Wiseman and Baudelaire. Diagnosis is not cure.